The radicalization of an ordinary man

CATHERINE SOLYOM, The Gazette07.04.2013

Ahmed Abbassi, a Tunisian who studied science in Quebec, is one of the accused in an alleged plot to target a Via Rail train.Facebook

Muhammad Robert Heft, who runs the Paradise Forever Islamic centre in Toronto, says he was being led down a path to violence after converting to Islam in 1998. He now works with young Muslims who are at risk of being radicalized.Aaron Harris
/ Special to The Gazette

Lorne Dawson, the chair of the sociology and legal studies department at the University of Waterloo, has consulted with CSIS and the RCMP on cases of homegrown terrorism. Online videos have been seen as fostering extremism, but there is no such thing as “self-radicalization,” Dawson says. “Somewhere along the line, there had to be some off-line reinforcement going on.”Dave Chidley
/ The Canadian Press

Chiheb Esseghaier, a Tunisian who studied science in Quebec, is one of the accused in an alleged plot to target a Via Rail train.Chris Young
/ The Canadian Press

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The day Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser were arrested, the RCMP summoned 22 Muslim leaders in the Greater Toronto Area to warn them of what was about...

MONTREAL - They were remarkably unremarkable.

Ever since 9/11, that truism has come to describe the perpetrators of so many homegrown terrorist plots in North America, from the would-be Times Square bombing in 2010 to the Boston Marathon bombings and the alleged conspiracy to derail a Via train between New York and Toronto.

“We had no clue.”

“He was very quiet.”

“I never would have guessed.”

But as the list of Canada’s own extremists grows, from the Toronto 18 — who plotted to storm Parliament — and the London, Ont., schoolmates who waged war in North Africa to Quebec’s roster of not-so-lone wolves, profilers from different fields of study are throwing away these clichés and trying to understand the process of radicalization that can transform an ordinary individual into a dedicated killer.

This week’s arrests of two B.C. residents for planting bombs outside the provincial legislature have given that quest for understanding added urgency.

Since the arrests in April of Chiheb Esseghaier and Ahmed Abbassi, former Quebec science students and alleged conspirators behind the Via Rail plot, theories have multiplied.

Perhaps a collision of immigrants’ religious values and the secular society of their new homeland contributes to a radicalization. Or a sermon about the latest insult visited upon those of their religion abroad. Or maybe extremism was fostered by a mentor.

It takes a perfect storm of circumstances to create a jihadist in Canada, profilers say.

To stop a jihadist takes someone to understand them — and talk them down.

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Lorne Dawson has just finished meeting with Japanese documentary filmmakers in his office at the University of Waterloo about the hostage-taking and subsequent raid in January at the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria, in which 10 Japanese workers were killed (more than any other nationality).

The filmmakers wanted to know about two young men from London, Ont., who were also found in the rubble — among the jihadists.

But how to explain to viewers in Japan how the middle-class upbringing of a Greek Orthodox teenager in small-town London led him to convert to Islam in Grade 10, and later play a role in their countrymen’s death?

Dawson has made a career of trying to understand how radicalization can, and does, happen in Canada.

Working closely with CSIS and the RCMP, who have reached out for help from the academic community, Dawson is one of few civilians to gain access to the full evidence compiled against homegrown terrorists like the Toronto 18 — albeit after their convictions.

He says there is no one profile of a homegrown terrorist — that contrary to popular belief, they are not crazy, weak, weird or vulnerable. But they do have some things in common that revolve around issues of identity and fitting in, he told the filmmakers.

“It’s more fascinating to recognize that they are really ordinary kids that can come from anywhere like London, Ont., or Montreal and that the processes that turn them into radicals aren’t extraordinary either,” says Dawson, the chair of the sociology and legal studies department at the University of Waterloo. “It’s a set of cumulative circumstances that transforms these remarkably ordinary people into extraordinary people. This is the mystery.”

Now Dawson, whose understanding of radicalization stems from his studies of religious movements (like the Moonies and the Krishnas, the Solar Temple and Jonestown), is being asked about the latest alleged jihadists to come out of Quebec: Esseghaier and Abbassi.

The information on them is scant.

Both came from well-respected Muslim families in Tunisia, arriving in Quebec to continue their studies in nanotechnology. (There is no evidence they knew each other in Tunisia.)

Esseghaier was working on his PhD at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Quebec’s foremost scientific research institute, focusing on biosensors and diagnostic tests for HIV and cancer. Abbassi was completing his master’s thesis in chemical engineering at Université Laval in Quebec City. He married a fellow student last summer, and celebrated back home in Tunisia.

But sometime between their arrival in Canada in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and their arrests in April, police allege Esseghaier and Abbassi plotted to use their knowledge to wreak havoc in the country that took them in.

By April, Esseghaier, 30, had all but dropped out of school, colleagues said. He grew his beard and was effectively homeless, either for lack of funds or because, according to neighbours in Rosemont, his behaviour had become so anti-social that he couldn’t retain a roommate or a lease.

He was arrested at a McDonald’s inside Central Station — where Via Rail trains arrive in Montreal — and has been charged with five terrorism-related crimes, including conspiracy to murder and instructing someone to carry out an activity for the benefit of a terrorist group: al-Qaida in Iran.

It would be the first terrorist plot in Canada sponsored by a foreign agency.

Raed Jaser, 35, a Toronto resident, was arrested under similar charges, though his implication in the conspiracy seems to have ended in September.

Abbassi, 26, who went to the U.S. in March after his visa to return to Canada from Tunisia was denied, was arrested in New York the same day as Esseghaier, but was charged only with lying to immigration authorities about his true purpose for requesting a work visa in the United States.

The accusations were nonetheless severe. “Ahmed Abbassi had an evil purpose for seeking to remain in the United States,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara: “to commit acts of terror and develop a network of terrorists here, and to use this country as a base to support the efforts of terrorists internationally.”

According to an undercover FBI agent who befriended him, Abbassi and Esseghaier had discussed poisoning a water or air supply, but they decided instead to attack a train.

Just how they would do it has not been revealed. But for Dawson and others working to prevent attacks in North America, what’s important is how they became radicalized to begin with.

Dawson doesn’t take long to fill in the blanks on what might have triggered the conversion.

Esseghaier and Abbassi were likely seen as golden boys in their own country for being able to study science in the West. But once here, they would soon realize that their ability and educational background in Tunisia were perhaps not as strong as that of their colleagues who were trained in Canada or the U.S.

The language barrier would make their studies harder still.

Then there’s the culture shock and feeling of isolation they would be experiencing, Dawson says. He theorizes these feelings might have been even stronger in Quebec, where the contrast between their religious Arabic background and secular Canadian society was likely to be the greatest.

“(Muslims in Quebec) are aware that any time they give an outward public expression of Islamic faith, it’s more likely to get a negative public reaction or bring about a stigmatization than elsewhere (in Canada),” says Dawson, citing conversations he’s had with Muslims and scholars in Quebec.

He cautions that these are broad generalities that may not apply in this case. As examples, though, he mentions how only Quebec has tabled a bill prohibiting the wearing of the hijab while receiving public services and has banned the wearing of the kirpan by Sikhs in the National Assembly.

If the accused felt marginalized, they would likely seek out fellow Muslims, Dawson suggests, and any anger they felt about their own situation might be compounded by a broader anger at the situation of Muslims abroad.

It would all lead to a crisis in identity, Dawson postulates — and a search for answers.

“For us in a secular society like Canada, we don’t understand people that get worked up by moral issues because of our laissez-faire attitude,” Dawson says. “We find it hard to understand that certain people really want moral clarity — right and wrong answers. But these guys think the world is out of sync and has lost its moral compass, and they feel obliged to correct the world.”

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Muhammad Robert Heft, who converted to Islam in 1998 after years of gambling and drinking, says it’s no coincidence that would-be jihadists are almost always either new converts or reverts — newly practising Muslims — seeking out a new identity and a sense of righteousness.

Heft, a German/Irish Canadian from Manitoba, said within a year of converting, an Egyptian man in Toronto was leading him down the path to violence, urging him to join what he said were thousands of jihadists underground and preaching eternal war with the West.

In 2003 he left for Iraq to act as a human shield during the Americans’ Shock and Awe campaign, fully expecting to be blown up while defending a mosque. That’s when he realized he would be of more use promoting slow change to Muslims and non-Muslims alike than dead in the name of Islam. He returned to Canada and began to work on de-radicalizing Muslim youth in Toronto, and building bridges between the Muslim community and intelligence agencies.

Heft knew several members of the Toronto 18. For Heft, they were just kids wanting to appear righteous. But they always went one step farther, he says — buying a detonator, then ammonium nitrate, and never stopping to think about what they were doing.

He also knows Jaser, the third alleged conspirator in the Via Rail plot, and has agreed to counsel him if he is released on bail.

“Raed Jaser’s father lived in my apartment from 2009 to 2010,” Heft says. “He told me then that Raed was a little rigid in his thinking and he didn’t like the road he was going down. For someone who knows my history, they would say, ‘Why didn’t he call it in?’ But I can give you so many others who balanced out in the meantime. Ninety-nine out of 100 don’t end up where he ended up. Why is that? Because there were opportunities presented to him and not to others, and certain people surrounded him. How radical we get depends on viewpoints. A perfect storm has to happen to get these guys.”

The question is: where did those viewpoints come from, and who was surrounded by whom?

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The Internet has been a big influence. In the early 2000s, videos of beheadings circulated online, as did images of abuses by American and allied forces in Iraq, like the photos of detainees at Abu Ghraib being tortured.

Images of children being blown up in Baghdad motivated Heft to go to Iraq as a human shield in 2003, but they influenced so many others to become violent, he says.

From 2004 to 2010, Heft opened his Toronto home to young Muslims at risk of radicalization, as somewhat of a “theological detox” centre.

“We would catch them on the Internet watching beheading videos,” says Heft, who runs the Paradise Forever Islamic centre and support group in Toronto. “In 2003 a Muslim country is invaded and the Internet is at a point where you could search and find recruitment videos, videos of the beheading of (journalist) Daniel Pearl, and then of course raw footage of the blunders of U.S. troops in Iraq. All of these things allow us to not have a balanced perspective.”

It’s not for nothing that the U.S. National Security Agency and its Canadian counterpart, Communications Security Establishment Canada, have been closely monitoring Internet use, especially for certain keywords. Terrorist. Kill the president. Jihad.

In an interview in June from a detention centre in Toronto, Esseghaier did not address the charges against him, but spoke at length about Canadian soldiers killing Muslims in Afghanistan.

“Me, I am arrested because of a plan to attack Canada,” he told the Toronto Star. “The Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, why they are not arrested? ... This is not an allegation of a plan, this is real killing on the ground.”

But according to Dawson, who also draws from the findings of the Quilliam foundation, a London-based think tank created by ex-Muslim radicals that has studied chat rooms in cyberspace, extremists are almost never motivated by what they see on the Internet alone.

There is no “self-radicalization,” Dawson says. There has to be real-world, face-to-face interaction.

Using an example from his studies of religious movements of the ’80s and ’90s, he notes that even televangelists knew they could get on TV and talk up a storm but needed to have volunteers calling people on the phone and providing local gathering places for the faithful, or they wouldn’t get donations.

“Somewhere along the line, there had to be some off-line reinforcement going on,” Dawson says, turning his attention back to Esseghaier and Abbassi, “some mentor who encouraged them in their piety and moral view at odds with our society. Perhaps no one encouraged them to be violent, but to adopt the precursor world views that led them to the edge of violence.”

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Heft and Dawson agree that radicalization in Canada happens more often outside an established institution. Especially since 9/11, Dawson says, radical views do not find a sympathetic ear in established mosques, and so radicals end up starting their own kind of “garage mosque” in which they interpret the Qur’an as they see fit. Members of the Toronto 18, for example, would give sermons at their high school.

In Montreal, one particular mosque has raised suspicions in the past, however. The Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah mosque, on Hutchison St. in Park Extension, was listed among nine houses of prayer or Islamic institutes worldwide that the U.S. military considered to be places where “known al-Qaida members were recruited, facilitated or trained,” according to classified American intelligence documents that were leaked in 2011.

Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millennium Bomber, who was caught crossing the B.C./Washington border with explosives at the end of 1999, frequented the mosque, while Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who is detained at Guantanamo Bay, served briefly as an imam at the mosque in 1999, before returning to his home in Mauritania in 2000.

Esseghaier’s father, while claiming his son was surely innocent of the charges against him, nevertheless said he was alarmed by what he had heard in mosques while visiting Montreal.

“His religious involvement came more from Canada than Tunisia, I am sure of it,” Mohammed Rached Esseghaier told Radio-Canada. “Because I went to some mosques over there and I heard what some of the imams say. I didn’t like it at all.”

Heft says a politically charged sermon can strike a chord with some Muslims. “After getting pumped up that America is evil, most will go back to normal and head to Tim Hortons. But some may say, ‘He’s right, and what will we do about it?’ ”

Muslim Council of Montreal president Salam Elmenyawi did not respond to requests for comments for this story, nor did administrators of the Centre Socio-Culturel Côte-des-Neiges, where Esseghaier is believed to have attended prayers. But speaking just after the documents on the Al Sunnah mosque were leaked in 2011, Elmenyawi said none of the mosque’s administrators or leaders had ever been accused of terrorist connections or activities, and that the mosque couldn’t be held responsible for screening all those who come in for prayers.

“This mosque is the largest in Montreal, is situated in the centre of the city and is attended by hundreds of different people,” Elmenyawi said at the time. “No doubt if the mosque administrators ever become aware of anything illegal or suspicious taking place in the mosque, they would alert the authorities. But it is unfeasible to expect them to know the backgrounds of each individual who attends the prayers, or to blame the mosque itself if ever any of its congregation is found guilty of a crime.”

Heft says the average Muslim prays anywhere, stays for 20 minutes and leaves, and may not even know the imam in a given mosque.

To him, it’s the “do-it-yourself” Islam, in garage mosques, that is dangerous. New converts are like sponges, he says. They get confused by so many people’s different interpretations of Islam, and in their confusion they may meet someone who radicalizes them by telling them to read the Qur’an and its teachings for themselves. “Jihad” in particular can be interpreted and misinterpreted in myriad ways.

They may feel disenfranchised at a mosque run by someone from a different culture or speaking another language, or by their own families who tell them not to grow a beard or become “too Muslim,” Heft explains.

“So they’re opening the Qur’an and building God as they go along — they’re building their faith according to the English translation of God knows whose understanding of religion. You ask, whose translation is it? You don’t even read Arabic!

“They find a guy who’s not talking about killing people, but he’s leading them to understand the religion on a do-it-yourself level. That’s how he radicalizes them. So they can read ‘kill (the infidels) wherever you find them’ without any context, and think that God is speaking to them directly.”

Heft is eager to learn where Jaser was getting his ideas from. Jaser’s father thinks it was from Esseghaier, he says. According to news reports, the two met at a mosque in Toronto in 2011.

In the meantime, the FBI believes it was Abbassi who radicalized Esseghaier. According to an undercover agent, they met in New York before their arrests in April.

Dawson suggests there may have been a “buddy system” in which they radicalized each other. Or perhaps there was someone else involved who hasn’t been arrested. In Dawson’s discussions with CSIS and the RCMP, he has repeatedly been told there are many other people somehow associated with a terrorist plot who are never arrested because their input does not fall outside the scope of freedom of expression.

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In a bid to establish a profile of the homegrown terrorist, in January researchers in the U.S. began compiling the biographies of 1,000 people indicted on terrorism charges, through a project known as START (Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security.

START could show the average age of those perpetrating terrorist acts, for example, and fill in some of the gaping holes in our understanding of radicalization in North America. Extremism is just a phase for most so-called Muslim radicals in their quest to be virtuous, but why do a rare few take the next step from radical ideas to violence?

Dawson will be working on a Canadian sub-sample, but he says the results may be a long way off.

“The academic research is in its infant stages,” Dawson says. “It’s very complex. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”

One of the main hurdles is that terrorist suspects and convicts — and their families and friends — don’t talk, either because they’re still terrorists or because their lawyers tell them not to.

The silence surrounding the two alleged conspirators from Quebec, for example, is deafening. No one who really knows the suspects will speak publicly about them. Abbassi’s wife, with whom he lived in Quebec City, asked that neither her name nor her profession be revealed. His professor at Université Laval, Trong-On Do, wouldn’t speak to The Gazette either. A Facebook page titled Free Ahmed Abbassi — which has more than 2,000 “likes” — is full of glowing portraits of the accused, but none of those making comments on the page would respond to a request for an interview.

Esseghaier had a thesis adviser who journalists have been trying to locate since Esseghaier was arrested. Mohammed Zourob left the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in November for a teaching position in Saudi Arabia, but his blog and most of his digital footprint was erased from the Internet the day of Esseghaier’s arrest.

It is not clear how close they were, but his virtual disappearance suggests to Dawson he may have been either a police informant or a mentor.

Zourob was supposed to present a paper he co-wrote with Esseghaier at SPIE (the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers) in San Diego in August. A spokesperson said the paper has been withdrawn from the program, however, and the organization has no information about Zourob’s whereabouts.

As for Esseghaier himself, he has been vocal in calling for a lawyer who will defend him based on the Qur’an, not the criminal code. His parents have asked a family friend, Montreal lawyer Imane Ben Bahri, to represent him — and to protect him from self-incrimination. Esseghaier has not responded to her requests, Ben Bahri said.

She said a group of Moroccan nationals who prayed at the same Côte-des-Neiges mosque as Esseghaier has been raising funds to help with his legal defence, if there is one, but they would not talk publicly about it either. They can’t believe Esseghaier is guilty, she said, and neither can his parents.

“For them, Chiheb is the genius of the family,” Ben Bahri says. “He was always calm and serene; he was always the first in his class. They are in mourning — they don’t know what will happen.”

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